In January 2010, Matt Mireles launched SpeakerText, a company that transcribes online videos. It was a good idea in theory, but it lost money for 18 months straight.

SpeakerText was using Amazon's Mechanical Turk to find freelancers to transcribe videos, which isn't very costly. The quality was so poor though, that SpeakerText had to spend additional money to hire someone to check all of the work.

"For every dollar we spent on Mechanical Turk, we were spending two to fix the errors," says Mireles. To save his startup, Mireles began to work on a solution.

He and his team of Carnegie Mellon engineers built Humanoid, a robust algorithm that can stamp reputations on all the workers in its 20,000-person network. Humanoid's reputation algorithm takes into account the time of day, how many tasks a worker has completed, and a worker's project history to determine how likely a worker is to do a good job.

When a task is assigned, like transcribing a video, Humanoid uses the reputations to dish out the job to the right workers. It oversees the projects and can reassign tasks if workers take too long to complete them.

Mireles has essentially created a robot boss, but the technology wasn't easy to build. He says it took his team until version 5.0 to get the software working properly. Now Humanoid can adequately oversee tasks that the average American high school student could accomplish.

Since the creation of Humanoid, SpeakerText has been able to stop hiring managers and keep itself afloat. In the next few months, SpeakerText will roll up into Humanoid and become one of a few Humanoid products.

Mireles thinks there's a big market for augmented reality-based technology in the future. His robot-like computer manager is one example. Others are Google's self-driving cars and Apple's Siri. Stat Sheet is using computers to get rid of writers altogether.

While Mireles swears by the robot boss he's built, we're curious to see how fool-proof the task manager really is. But he seems to have Google Ventures convinced, since it just invested in Humanoid.